User reviews are riddled with manipulation, PR schemes, individual jealousies
and angry vendors. But they're still the least bad way to sort out the
online wheat from the chaff

The Christmas shopping period is upon us, and millions will eschew the crowded stores and go online to buy presents. And when we're trying to determine from a tiny photo and incomplete product description whether Auntie Jen will like that coffee machine, we rely on what everyone else thinks. We rely on the user reviews.

Without online reviews, modern e-commerce would collapse. They are everywhere, about everything. Over on Amazon – whose business model depends in no small part on customers review the stuff they buy – there is no product so drab that someone, somewhere, hasn't felt the urge to write about it. The "Lysol toilet bowl brush with rim extension and caddie" has 230 reviews. "This is the first caddie I've found that holds the brush inside the caddie while lifting it up off the base," writes one satisfied user. "This allows the brush to drip dry, and then air can flow in and dry the base, which is slippery plastic and easy to wipe clean." Thirty-three people have reviewed Diet Coke ("just great, and best in glass bottles"). Russell Brand’s new book has over 250, often very funny, user reviews.

It doesn’t stop there of course. Hotels, YouTube videos, restaurants, anything online. Amateur uploaded "tube" pornography sites have user ratings and, ahem, insightful, detailed comments. It even stretches into the online anonymous drugs markets, where these illegal sites all have review options, usually a score out of five plus written feedback. Dealers are desperate for five-star reviews, like the following, taken at random from hundreds just like it: "5/5: Absolutely AMAZING. Ordered at 445pm and received THE NEXT DAY! I chose the express shipping, but this guy is the best. Don't even look to anyone else." (1 gram HQ Meth ICE Crystal Shard)

In an age of ubiquitous offers and products, we don’t have much choice. Relying on the crowd is the easiest, quickest, and most reliable way to make a choice. "Legal e-commerce wouldn’t work without user reviews," Luke Upchurch from the consumer rights umbrella groups Consumer International told me. "They allow consumers to make more informed decisions about product choice – and allow producers to build up reputations." According to research published by Consumer International, 88 per cent of people in the UK rely on them when making purchasing decision. In a time characterised by a sea of information and limited attention spans, the easiest thing is to always trust the crowd: what’s trending. How many YouTube hits a video has. How many retweets a post has received. The result, of course, is that we all end up watching and buying the same things, at the expense of risky serendipity. We’re too busy, or lazy, or conditioned, to do anything else.

And, most of the time, they work pretty well. After all, many reviewers are serious and honest people. Amazon, has its "Top Reviewers", who are trusted and valuable commentators on products. They even have a "Hall of Fame" for those that other users have found the most valuable. One, a woman called Harriet Klausner has written over 30,000 reviews in her time. One of the very best, a multiyear Hall of Famer, is a woman called Joana Daneman; she has typed out over 3,000 reviews and has been in the illustrious Hall for the last 12 years in a row. She’s from Delaware, USA.

She does it, she tells me, because she enjoys it. She depended on customer reviews for her own purchases; and then decided to review every book she’d ever read. "It kind of got out of hand from there," she explains. She only spends an hour a day on reviews – first thing in the morning – and sees it as a hobby. Because she’s so well respected, and her reviews carry so much weight, writers routinely send her free copies of their books. She turns most of them down – there are just too many.

People like Joana are the luminaries, but there are plenty more who dip in occasionally. Why they do it is one of the mysteries of the digital age. But if you’ve not written a review of a product online, you should. Joane is right – it's fun. I spent 15 minutes writing a review of an All You Can Eat Chinese buffet the other day and thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. Plus: it’s a decent reward for a good service. And in the event of a bad experience, rather than pulling out your hair and phoning indifferent customer service managers, the final laugh can be yours with a few keystrokes as you dish out revenge served icy cold.

But because they have become so important to business, companies and individuals don’t always play it straight. They write their own reviews. Or trash rivals. Or pay other people for reviews. Or threaten to fine people who write bad ones, which is what happened to Tony and Jan Jenkinson last week, who were fined – since repaid, thank God – by the hotel they’d stayed at for filing a harsh review of the establishment. (If they’d read the reviews on TripAdvisor, they would have probably avoided it: "horrific"; "avoid avoid avoid", "disgusting place", "never again", and so on). All this is feeding a growing "Online Reputation Management" industry. Hundreds of companies now offer to repair and improve the reputation of companies online. Several major companies – including Samsung – have been fined for manipulating or faking their own reviews. According to a recent report from academics at the Universities of Harvard and Boston, roughly 16 per cent of all restaurant reviews on Yelp are identified as fraudulent, and tend to be more extreme than other reviews. Of course it’s not just companies. Back in 2010, Orlando Figes admitted to taking to Amazon to write trash reviews of his rivals’ work. This sort of thing is just the tip of the iceberg.

For all that, on the whole, user reviews are the least bad way to sort out the wheat from the chaff. A smart, easy way to get a vague idea of what you might be getting. But we need to make sure this critical dimension of modern life stays decent and honest – because it is, and always will be, riddled with manipulation, PR schemes, individual jealousies and angry vendors. It’s a major consumer rights issue: perhaps Which? should get involved and try to keep the whole business a little more trustworthy.

But we shouldn’t ditch user reviews. Think of the alternative. I spent far too many hours in my youth wandering around aimlessly looking for somewhere to eat or sleep with no idea what I’d get and no way of complaining if I wasn’t happy. Sure, there was the occasional hidden gem unearthed – but more typically it was dreary, overpriced, and unsatisfactory.